Live Play Data

Umbral Collar Zealot

· Creature — Human Cleric · Secrets of Strixhaven Commander (SOC)

Live Inclusion

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Times Brought

552

Decks Running

289

Median Cast Turn

Drawn → Played

75%

Format

Multiplayer 1v1

75% of drawn Umbral Collar Zealots are cast before the game ends, with a median first-cast turn of 5 across 540 tracked multiplayer games on Playgroup Live.

Umbral Collar Zealot sits in 3% of tracked Commander decks on Playgroup Live, a focused niche driven almost entirely by sacrifice-synergy commanders. When it lands in a player's hand, 75% of those copies reach the battlefield before the game closes out.

The card's mechanic is deliberately cheap to activate: sacrifice another creature or artifact to surveil 1. That makes it a repeatable library-manipulation engine in decks that already want to put things into the graveyard, and the top-commander list reflects that. Dina, Essence Brewer leads by a wide margin, accounting for the largest single slice of tracked decks. The spread across 257 distinct players, with no single contributor exceeding 28% of observations, gives the dataset reasonable breadth for a niche uncommon.

Battlefield stickiness lands at 42%, lower than a generic utility creature. That number reflects the sacrifice theme itself: the Zealot is often an early play that gets sacrificed to its own ability or to a synergy piece before the game ends. The card does what it was built for, then exits on purpose.

At a glance

3% of tracked Commander decks include Umbral Collar Zealot
75% of drawn copies reach the battlefield before the game ends
T5 median first-cast turn across tracked games
42% battlefield stickiness once cast, low by design in sacrifice decks
257 distinct players have brought this card to a tracked game
28% draw rate, consistent with a singleton in a 100-card deck

First-cast turn

n=117

17%

11%

37%

T6-9

T10+

Median 5 P25 3 · P75 7 · max 16

On curve 22% (20 / 117 cast on T2) Cast same turn as drawn 31%

The "good card" funnel

552 brought · 257 players

Brought to game

552

Ever drawn

156

Reached battlefield

117

Still on board at game end

75%

Of 552 copies brought to tracked games, 156 were drawn, 117 of those were cast, and roughly four in ten landed copies survived to end of game on the battlefield.

≥ -12.0pp

Players who cast this card win 26% of the time (n=113) , vs 29% when it never left the library (n=337).

When players drew this card but left it in hand, they won 28% (n=36) — about the same as leaving it in the library. Those players survived long enough to draw it, so the gap above is about the card resolving, not just about surviving.

Observed gap -3.3pp; 95% confidence interval -12.0pp to +5.5pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.

Final zone distribution

178 instances

1.7%

Library

27.5%

Battlefield

43.8%

Graveyard

8.4%

Exile

Most Umbral Collar Zealots end the game in the graveyard rather than on the battlefield, a direct consequence of the sacrifice theme the card is built to enable rather than a sign of poor performance.

Commanders that played this card

in tracked games

1 Dina, Essence Brewer 85 decks
2 Teysa Karlov 12 decks
3 Sephiroth, Fabled SOLDIER // Sephiroth, One-Winged Angel 11 decks
4 Meren of Clan Nel Toth 10 decks
5 Terra, Herald of Hope 7 decks
6 Ygra, Eater of All 7 decks
7 Celes, Rune Knight 6 decks
8 Marchesa, the Black Rose 6 decks
9 Gorma, the Gullet 5 decks
10 Shadow the Hedgehog 5 decks

Dina, Essence Brewer leads the tracked commander list by a wide margin, underscoring the card's tight fit in life-drain and graveyard-value strategies, with the remaining slots spread across sacrifice and aristocrats builds.

Card text

Umbral Collar Zealot

Creature — Human Cleric

Sacrifice another creature or artifact: Surveil 1. (Look at the top card of your library. You may put it into your graveyard.)

3 / 2

Secrets of Strixhaven Commander (SOC) · Uncommon · Illustrated by Dmitry Burmak

Frequently Asked

How often is Umbral Collar Zealot drawn in a Commander game?

Across 540 tracked multiplayer games where the card was in a deck, it was drawn 28% of the time. That is typical for a singleton in a 100-card deck. Of 156 copies that reached a player's hand, 75% were cast before the game ended. The remainder is largely a game-length effect: copies drawn late in a closing game may not find a window to resolve.

What turn does Umbral Collar Zealot usually hit the battlefield?

Median first-cast turn is 5, with the distribution spanning from as early as turn 1 to as late as turn 16. The 25th percentile lands on turn 3 and the 75th on turn 7, so the card sees play across a wide range of game states rather than clustering neatly on its two-mana curve turn. Only 22% of casts landed exactly on curve, which reflects how often players draw the Zealot mid-game rather than in their opening hand.

Why is Umbral Collar Zealot almost never cast on curve?

At two mana, the Zealot could theoretically come down on turn 2, but 22% of tracked casts actually hit that mark. Most of the time the card simply is not in the opening hand, and it enters play whenever it is drawn rather than being held for a specific window. The hand-to-cast data shows a median of one turn spent in hand before casting, so when players do draw it, they tend not to sit on it long.

What commanders run Umbral Collar Zealot most often?

Dina, Essence Brewer dominates the top-commander list by a large margin, which makes sense: Dina rewards life-drain triggers and loves filling the graveyard, both goals that Umbral Collar Zealot supports directly. Beyond Dina, the card appears in Teysa Karlov, Meren of Clan Nel Toth, Ygra Eater of All, and a range of Grixis and mono-black sacrifice builds. The distribution across commanders is fairly spread, with no single pairing outside Dina accounting for more than a small slice of tracked decks.

Is Umbral Collar Zealot legal in all formats?

The card is legal in Commander, Legacy, Modern, Pioneer, Vintage, Standard, Historic, Alchemy, and several Brawl variants. It is not legal in Pauper (it is uncommon, not common) or in older formats like Old School and Premodern. For Commander specifically, there are no restrictions or ban-list concerns.

Does casting Umbral Collar Zealot actually improve your win rate?

The current data shows a win rate of 26% in games where the card was cast (n=113), compared to 29% in games where it stayed in the library (n=337). The delta is negative at -3.3 percentage points, but both sample sizes produce a wide confidence interval, so this should be read as a directional early signal rather than a firm conclusion. Decks that include the Zealot are built around sacrifice synergies, which introduces selection effects that the raw delta does not fully control for.